Schrödinger’s Cabinet by Adam K. Childs comes with a cast of characters described at the front of the book and labeled as Dramatis Personae. This is a nice thing to do; the reader can refer back to it but it is also daunting. Some readers may be put off by this if they try to read it first. Don’t do this. All the various government gobbledygook is confusing even to those who work or have worked in government. It is a nice list to refer back to, however.

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Blessed Dark by Faith Shields is a basic man-of-the-cloth church type fighting an unknown beast. Father Jim Wallis goes to Colina Sangrienta where he will be met by the resident priest, Father Gaston. After his car breaks down, he is warned by a passer-by not to go there; it is an evil place. Wallis goes there to find a deserted village by day and horrible animal noises by night. He feels himself in danger as he discovered the remains of a goat in the morning that had presumably been devoured by the yet unseen monster. Still in the village, he consults Father Anthony, his superior who had sent him to the village. Wallis was informed that there have been rumors of a beast, the Enmascarada, that terrified all by projecting mental images of horror into potential victims. Wallis leaves the village, finds a cave where the monster is based and attempts to defeat the Enmascarada, a monster Wallis believes exists on another plane, or in an alternate reality. Does he win? Fans of this type of story will have to read it to find the answer.

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Mind and Flesh by 8Loki comes with this warning from the Amazon Kindle book site:
“WARNING: Strong explicit content that can hurt all sorts of sensibilities. Weird and hardcore on all fronts, you have been warned.” That warning is understated. The novel is 239 pages divided into four sections: PART 1 – My Mind PART 2 – Her Flesh PART 3 – His Flesh PART 4 – Our Flesh. PART 1 is the most difficult to get through. It reads as if it were vocabulary vomit without any connections between sentences or paragraphs. If there were a theme, it would be as if a bunch of guys (females would not act this way of course) got together with the aim of grossing each other out with displays of vulgar language used in describing perverted situations. Several pages (maybe ten) into part 1 I decided this was not worth reading; I would abandon this. But I didn’t. Why?

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Sixteen years ago there was a car crash in the countryside near Kent, close to Wexham village, England. Three people were rescued by John, the patriarch of a reclusive family that tolerated no interaction with its neighbors. They did not live to wish they hadn’t been rescued. The husband and wife were fed to pigs. The badly damaged child, still an infant, had her head sewn back together by John with whatever home-made implements were at hand. She got a new name, Enda Clare. She became part of the family, a necessary part. The family needed girls. Last Wrong Turn by Amy Cross begins.

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Sixtus by Tim Kizer is a short novel with three short stories. I downloaded this from Kindle Unlimited based on the description I read about the “main” story, Sixtus. This was another lesson in reading a complete description of what I choose to read. I should have scrolled down for the complete description. On the other hand, I was able to compare writing styles when Kizer shifted to different plots and story lines. I found all stories fairly predictable despite the author throwing in several twists. These were not subtle; there was nothing leading up to them. For me, it was as if several story ideas were explored then a decision was made to try to link several of them into a coherent short story. The stories were not bad. They were not uninteresting. They just did not come up to the level of good.

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Back Again by Susan May is a full length (379 pages) novel that I have been waiting to read. A long time ago I read a short story or novelette of the same name by the same author. In that story a mother named Dawn witnessed the death of her son Tommy in a horrible accident in which her son was hit by a car driven by Kylie, a recently unemployed cashier who was paying more attention to her phone than to her driving. Dawn would undoubtedly grieve for a long time. But she didn’t. Only ten days after Tommy’s death, Dawn returned to the day of her son’s death and relived it. After seeing it again she lived for another ten days only to be returned again to the death scene. She was in a time never-ending time loop. She believed it to be never-ending and if she had to choose, she preferred to spend time with her son even though she knew the grim outcome.